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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

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Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#451

Post by bigiain »

solidasparagus wrote: post #449
bigiain wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. From the angle I'm looking, AWS wants to sell Redis/Mongo/Elasticsearch because that's what the devs are using. The devs are using it because it solves one of their problems well (or, less charitably, because its a "standard part" of new-framework-de-jour). I can't think of any piece of software that came out of a cloud provider into a place of being "the essential hot new dev framework". I don't deny for a…

Well I think cloud providers look at software offerings differently. To them, software is a managed distributed system that works at scale and probably doesn't make very much sense if there's only a single user. It's hard for a managed service like that to be distributed as a single codebase or binary in the way that redis can. But they still pump out technologies that have high dev adoption. Things like Lambda, S3,…

Yeah - Google are definitely different to Amazon, but I'm not sure the Google Cloud part of Google can take credit for all the cool software Google release.

And I'll give Amazon credit for Lambda and Kinesis, but at least in my head, S3 is just ludicrous-scale BerekleyDB (or any of the persist-to-disk forks of memcached including the one I wrote back when it was still written in Perl).

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#452

Post by filesystemdude »

dragonwriter wrote: post #285
EduardoBautista wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not all volunteering. The Linux kernel, for example, is maintained mostly by paid individuals from all sorts of companies such as Red Hat, IBM, and even Microsoft.

All of which make good money selling support services and/or cloud infrastructure, and have decided to donate the fruits of the labor they are buying because doing so helps drive those businesses. So, again, the developer labor is donated, by parties that are not blind to the market impacts. Where is the problem?

I don't think you understand the Linux vendor support model.

The labor isn't "donated" in any sense of the word. It's not like these big companies just pay hundreds of kernel developers to sit around and make commits to whatever they're in the mood to do today.

Clients pay Linux vendors to get the hardware support, features, etc. that they need written into the Linux kernel, and the vendors do that for them. They write the code, test it, harden it, and get it upstreamed so that the client isn't stuck carrying a patched kernel on their own in perpetuity.

It's not the financial interest of Linux consumers (think: banks, airlines, healthcare systems, militaries, cloud platforms, entertainment producers, etc.) to pay millions of dollars a year to have their own in-house kernel development and support team when they can pay a vendor to do it.

It's not just about support in the sense of someone to pick up the phone, it's about support in the sense of maintaining and developing mission-critical software for large enterprises.

And with that, indemnity.

Do your shareholders want to hear that you're working with a tried, tested, trusted vendor to make sure your systems that can never, ever, ever go down are in fact designed that way? Or do they want to hear, don't worry, Dave in IT's got it, he got a kernel patch accepted once? In many industries, IT is just a cost center and a risk. Corporations and governments are motivated to lower their IT-related risk in the most financially-prudent manner, which usually means a vendor.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#453

Post by kelnos »

chii wrote: post #319
kelnos wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "at that time". My current Linux desktop (Xfce) is way better than Win95 or Win2k. I stopped using Windows around then, so I can't comment on WinXP or newer. I think arguably a current Linux distro/desktop designed for non-technical users is better for them than Win95 or Win2k was.

I (a laymen) buy a random tablet pen, and it works immediately on windows. To get it to work on linux, may be there's already a driver, may be it's not supported. Either way, it's a gamble if it works on linux. Tell me that windows isn't still better for the laymen?

Did you even read what I wrote? I literally did not say what you're asking me to defend.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#454

Post by witten »

sudhirj wrote: post #374
witten wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Aren’t Creaive Commons licenses not suitable for code? Can’t find a reference but they seemed pretty clear about that.

You are correct. And yet I've found multiple cases in which they're used for code.
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